Year-End Coverage

The Licentiousness Award

The best garage rock suggests depravity through performance decisions: scuzzy guitars, throaty howls, low-fidelity sound, sloppy drumming. Cassette-only release Raw Romance has all the above, but it also goes further than mere suggestion. Lyrics about having sex with masks on, sleeping in the gutter, and “Your Mouth,” among other debasements, are both jarring and funny. Is Nobunny for real or some kind of hipster burlesque? When you learn that he performs wearing a grimy, feculent rabbit mask and no pants, things start to make a little more sense. Raw Romance begins with a film excerpt in which a man asks, “Do you really want to hear this?” The answer is maybe.